


First Principles

by pipistrelle



Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [6]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Brief description of injury, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Series, i just think they're neat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26528212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Palamedes confronts the looming spectre of mortality. Camilla gets an unusually good lunch.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914445
Comments: 20
Kudos: 100





	First Principles

**Author's Note:**

> These two are always living in my head rent free.
> 
> For the prompt "wounded".

> “Look, this conversation is all I’ve ever dreamed about,” said Gideon, “but I’m fine. H -- my necromancer overreacted.” (This, at least, seemed to strike a chord with Camilla, whose glance softened with the understanding of someone whose necromancer was also prone to gross overreaction.)

_\--Gideon the_ _Ninth_ , Ch 21

She entered no tournaments, and they weren't the Fourth, to sally out against the Emperor's foes. The first time she got seriously hurt, beyond sprains and hairline fractures, was a training accident when she was sixteen; a sword-rack fell on her, shattered her femur and nicked the fat femoral artery beneath. 

The pain was obliterating, though she didn't experience much of it before she blacked out. 

When she woke up again the Sixth House adepts had put her more or less back together. To wit: she was alive and with both legs attached, which was enough to let her stagger out into the corridor. There, predictable as Dominicus rising, she found Palamedes, pale and wild-eyed and shouting at the orderlies, who wouldn't let him into the clinic on the inarguable grounds that he was making a scene. But when he caught sight of her over their heads he abandoned his last scrap of decorum and pushed through them, his thin arms flailing like wind turbines, and all he said was, "Cam!" 

She wobbled, still feeling like her leg was trying to claw its way separate from her body. He hauled her down the corridor into an unused storeroom, and squeezed her with more strength than she'd thought he had. He pressed his forehead to hers; they were both clammy with drying sweat. "By the kidneys of the King Undying, I categorically forbid you to die in a stupid accident. If you do I'll have no choice but to come completely apart." 

"Don't be dramatic," she croaked.

His arms tensed like he wanted to shake her. "Hark at her, with a shattered femur, telling _me_ not to be dramatic!" he announced irascibly to the empty room. 

“It’s not shattered anymore,” she pointed out. 

He ignored this very salient point. “One flesh, one end, Camilla the Sixth! It goes both ways. Which reminds me, I’m adding a new stipulation to the Bylaws. What is the _use_ of being Master Warden if they won't let me in to see my own cavalier when she's hurt? You can help me proof the draft after mods next week.”

“If you say so, Warden.”

After he'd re-examined the work of the medical necromancers and grudgingly admitted its adequacy, he cancelled all her upcoming responsibilities in a flagrant abuse of his Warden's powers and left her in her bed to sleep off the cocktail of trauma, agony, and anesthetic. Eight hours later he came back with a tray of higher-quality food than he could have legally gotten with both their treat rations combined. Camilla was too hungry to quibble over morals, and anyway she knew she'd lose, since Palamedes had probably calculated her post-healing thalergy deficit down to the nanojoule, and she was too tired to dispute his math.

So all she said, between bites, was, "Where'd you find real hydroponics? I thought it'd all been flash-dried."

"The experimental labs are still running," he said absently. He folded himself onto the little stool that was the only other furniture in the room, shoulders hunched to keep his head from bumping the ceiling. 

For a while he just sat there, not watching her, not even pretending to read or notate some spare piece of flimsy like he usually did in idle moments. She could practically see the thoughts rotate through his brain, each one slotted into place, examined, and discarded, like microscopy slides. The Warden saw things clearly, which was really what set him apart from the rest of the Scholars and the rest of the Sixth and the rest of humanity. The Warden stared into the pit of a hypothetical universe where his cavalier bled out on the practice floor -- or fell down a compost chute, or asphyxiated in a station breach, or took a gilded rapier to the left ventricle -- and vectored in the new data he'd acquired, specifically, that he could not live in such a universe --

"You could," Cam said. Truth first, only and always. He liked to say that solace in lies was an oxymoron.

Palamedes wasn't surprised that she'd kept pace with his thoughts. He looked at her, his eyes so clear they were almost luminous; rainwater on glass. It didn't rain on the Sixth, but Camilla had seen vids. Pre-Resurrection, mostly. 

She said, "You may not be aware, Warden, but there’s this thing cavaliers often do involving sharp metal implements that can be quite dangerous --"

"Ha,” he said humorlessly. “There’s a difference between theory and practical application."

Gently she told him, “There is. And it needs to be taken into account.”

He blew out a breath between his teeth, took off his glasses and pressed the back of his hand hard against one eye, as though that might help him see what he hadn’t before. “Right as usual,” he said, rather vaguely. Then he stood, unfolding like a manipulator crane. “One request, if it’s not too much trouble: next time you perforate a major artery, don’t do it while I’m in a meeting of the Oversight Body, of all things. It’s such a slow and cautious beast, I think my precipitous exit might have spooked it into paralysis.”

She polished off the last contraband carrot, saw the minute relaxation in his shoulders. Thought, amused, that she probably had the same wearily self-satisfied look when she’d bullied him into eating enough for one day. “And you’re off to un-spook it?”

“As much as any mere mortal can, or it’ll paralyze the Grant Committee too, and then Admin’ll be out for my blood.” He resettled his glasses on his prodigious nose and peered at her again, nearly squinting. All the gravitas of the Master Warden had fallen away, and it was with a gangly, awkward, ineloquent tenderness that he pressed a brief kiss to her forehead and said, “Stay here — don’t you dare strain that leg until tomorrow at least. I’ll bring you dinner.”

“Yes, Warden. What committee meeting should I aim to interrupt, next time I perforate an artery?”

“Maintenance,” he said thoughtfully. “They could use the livening up. And make it a subclavian, I need more practice in the thoracic cavity. All this isn’t _just_ for her, you know.” At _this_ he moved his hand a little, indicating the stack of codices on curative science that he’d left on Cam’s floor two nights ago; and of course, between the two of them, there was only one _her_. 

“I’m flattered,” Cam said, blandly as ever, but he smiled, knowing that she meant it. 

“Rest that leg,” he told her again, and then he ducked out into the busy corridor. In about seven minutes he’d be safely back in the stultifying embrace of the Oversight Body, and she’d be free to at least do some stretches, to test and condition the re-knit muscles. (Her necromancer didn’t know everything.)


End file.
